Summer of the Crystal Skull Page 3

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PART II: Goin' Crackers
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Watch the Damn Movie

"What a waste of my time..."

- Ray Winstone as 'Mac' Michale in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I'm just kidding with that opening quote. When I heard the character say it in the movie, I thought it would be funny to open with that like I'm on Team Talkbacker and I abhorred the flick and was ready to stand before a jury and point out where it touched me using my Cairo Swordsman figure with his tunic off. But my decision to see the fourth Indiana Jones film, which was formed mainly from a realization that an article about why I didn’t want to see it wasn’t interesting enough by itself, came with a great amount of trepidation. I still didn’t feel like I owed it to anybody to take the plunge, and the best case scenario (I actually end up liking the thing) didn't seem to be worth risking the worst case scenario (I hate it and have to deal with the existence of a horrible Indiana Jones movie.) I basically had nothing to win and everything to lose.

Still, the climate felt right for me to finally nuke ol' fridge: two years later, I could safely climb up the bridge on the side of the cliff without the two opposing sides firing at each other from across the gap like the British soldiers and Thuggee in Temple of Doom. I don't know if it had anything to do with Iron Man being such a great summer movie in 2008 and Iron Man 2 being such a letdown in 2010, but for whatever reason I felt more inclined to just bite the bullet and acknowledge this film's existence by actually seeing it - but I had to prepare myself by getting into the right mindset to experience this film. Basically, I let it all go. I decided to make a mini-event of the evening, went out of my way to rent the movie on Blu-Ray (I had to go to a Blockbuster for the first time since I worked there in high school to do this) and made sure my daughter was put away for the night before cranking the volume and hitting play. I had set no rules for myself whatsoever except to try and forget everything I had heard – all spoilers and arguments from both sides – and, most importantly, everything I had ever seen in an Indiana Jones movie before. That, I decided, was the key to entering the Kingdom with as fresh and ambivalent a mind as possible: I made a conscious effort to allow the film to stand on its own and not suffer unfair comparisons to the original trilogy. If I had no expectations to be met, nobody’s childhoods would get raped in my dark apartment and a good time would be had by all.

Little did I know the movie had no intention of letting me forget the original films. In fact, it seemed terrified at the idea that I might. The fourth Indiana Jones movie is saturated wall-to-wall - you could say besieged - with in-jokes and references to the first three movies. The superficial reasoning behind this was, I'm sure, to get fanboys to jump up in their seats and high five whenever a favorite moment from the trilogy was intimated onscreen in the form of a character, prop, costume, line of dialogue, action set piece, sound effect, music cue or camera movement. It was so distracting that any pretense on my part of disregarding those previous films so this one could stand on its own merits quickly became not only futile but impossible; sitting down to write this now I find that not comparing this one to the others would not only be dishonest, it's not what the movie wants me to do. Spielberg clearly invites comparisons to the original films, and whether he decided to do so to confidently dare the doubters to bring on the comparisons or was simply worried this one wasn't "Indy" enough by itself, the floodgates are definitely open.

Everybody remembers that great moment in Last Crusade when Indy and Elsa are wandering through the catacombs and see the painting of the ark on the wall as John Williams' "Well of Souls" music creeps onto the soundtrack, the perfect wink to Indy fans. After a quick prelude/title sequence (which I'll come back to), this one opens in the warehouse where the "top men" in Washington stored the Ark at the end of the first one - turns out it's Hangar 51 - which is now being invaded by a squad of Russian soldiers who've brought Indy to help them find the item he had a hand in discovering "10 years ago." Some quick math makes it obvious that it's not the ark of the covenant they're after, but that's the joke: "Well of Souls" is prominently played (not just a few bars like in Last Crusade) and the Ark itself makes a cameo, unseen by any of the characters, as Indy is escaping the warehouse. It's a long-winded gag that makes no difference narratively and serves no real purpose other than to connect the movie to Raiders as quickly as possible. In the trilogy (the gates are open!), the moment we recognize the movie as part of the Indiana Jones universe is when we see Indy wearing the hat: this simple piece of costume is enough for us to accept that this is our guy, and the adventure has now officially begun. Revisiting the warehouse set, which seems much smaller and less intimidating than in the last shot of the first film, is a redundancy after seeing the noted archaeologist adorned with his headgear - we're with you Spielberg, no need to stop and start again! It feels like when a movie shows a shot of the Eiffel Tower, then adds a text at the bottom of the screen that says "Paris, France."

In that same opening scene Indy murmurs "Russians..." using the same intonation with which he uttered the famously damning "Nazis..." in parts 1 & 3. Later at the college, Spielberg mirrors the shot of Marcus Brody walking to Professor Jones' classroom (one already recycled in Last Crusade*) with Jim Broadbent substituting for Delholm Elliot. Before too long we're given poison dart natives similiar to the ones from the beginning of Raiders, two levers that operate a rotating secret entrance just like the ones in Temple of Doom, moving cobwebs in the caves visually evocative of those in Last Crusade. Why does Crystal Skull feel the need to support itself by using visuals from the original movies like a three-legged stool? The story itself begins to get a little familiar: Indy giving the exposition behind the skull sounds like his speech about Shiva and Kali in Temple of Doom, once again he chooses the wrong friends (Ray Winstone's 'Mac' Michale, who at least isn't played by Ricky Gervais) and when the enemy's plot to kidnap a fuddy duddy teacher (John Hurt as Professor 'Ox' Oxley) to lead them to the prize doesn't pan out they force Indiana to help them** a'la Last Crusade. There's a father-sin motorcycle chase, an attempt by the villains to break the hero's mind using a mystical devise, an epic action sequence with jeeps and a truck where the treasured item constantly changes hands, a fist fight with an enemy tough that incorporates the same cracking-punch sound effects and Wilhelm screams the first films made so recognizable and a group of ethnic warriors protecting the treasure who threaten the good guys but are easily defeated by the villains. None of this feels like David Koepp going back to the well; they are very clearly in the movie to make you think of the ones that came before and create some kind of visual and audial connection between them and this movie.

Are these likenesses a negative? Absolutely not - if John Fogerty has taught us anything, it's that it is judicially acceptable to plagiarize yourself – but too often they feel like crutches. When they actually work it really is like Spielberg knew the more hesitant fans would try to use the trilogy to negatively judge this film and wanted to very clearly state: "No. This is an Indiana Jones movie. Get used to it." Other times, it feels like desperation. "No, really: this is an Indiana Jones movie! Ignore the gray hair and CGI and look at the dangling keys with the Ark of the Covenant keychain!" As far as I'm concerned, if the movie demands to be held in the same regard as the ones that came before it, all bets are off and comparisons can be made without compunction. I hate to resort to that when I just argued in the first part of this article that the pro- and anti-Skull factions do the exact same thing, but those are the terms the movie set for itself.

Scenes from Crystal Skull are so tenaciously teethered to the other movies that any attempts to move into new territory practically bungee right back to the comfortable center of recognition, terrified of wandering too far from the proven formula. Like an old man wearing an earring, it to often tries to sap energy from the younger generation of films, even going so far as to have Indy quote a famous line of Han Solo's (and several others) from the Star Wars trilogy: "I have a bad feeling about this." Bringing that line into the Star Wars prequels felt like a sad attempt at connection, here it's like they ran out of things to grab from the Indiana Jones universe and tried to feed on Lucas' other milestone series. Even the opening drag race could even be called a homage to American Graffiti. Turns out I’m not the one nostalgic for the old movies...the filmmakers are!

All of this would have been fine, but they spent such a huge amount of creative time and energy on referencing the preceeding films I couldn't help wondering if said time and energy couldn't have gone into making the film more original. Or at least gone towards focusing on what's different, and using it to the movie's advantage. For example, the main character's age. Spielberg doesn't dwell too long on it thematically - instead he purposely slows a lot of the action down and makes Indy a little more human than he's ever been; that is to say, he'll still survive any number of outrageously unsurvivable scenarios but he'll miss his mark more often than not, swing backwards when he should going forwards. That in itself isn't anything new: in the first movie Indy tiredly shoots the Cairo swordsman instead of throwing down with him, in the second he seems to have some memory trouble when it comes to relying on his missing pistol, and the third film deals with mortality through the character of Indy's father and the themes of life-long obsession and the grail's gift of eternal life. The character has always been sympathetically mortal, just as likely to swing a shovel and accidentally hit an approaching enemy as land a flawlessly executed blow.

If the film insists on bringing up the previous adventures, it should show us how Indy is different. Instead of closing their eyes to reveal "Love You" messages to Professor Jones, his students should be closing their eyes to nap because they see him as a boring old teacher. His reputation as a professor of archeology, expert on the occult and obtainer of rare antiquities should seem less impressive to everybody including Indy - he should be beginning to feel like a museum himself. They do kick Jones out of the college in the movie, but that's really no different than Bond having his license to kill revoked and getting up to pretty much the same standard adventuring - it's not like he's being forced into retirement, it's more of a plot convenience. Feeling your age and reflecting on the good old days worked really well as a portrayal of Kirk in Wrath of Khan, and Crystal Skull borrows that film's device of an old flame and an estranged son the hero never knew he had without applying the necessity of them to the character himself. Kirk is unmistakable in his Starfleet uniform, actors new to the series or wearing a tupee identify themselves as Bond, James Bond with that trademark introduction, and likewise once the hat is on, we know it's Indiana Jones. Instead of proving it through countless references to the first films, I just wish there had been more emphasis on, Yep this is Indy, but here's how he's changed.

Spielberg and Ford are most successful establishing with Indy's first apperance in the film. There have been arguments about whether his entrance is an ingenius way to re-introduce the character 20 years down the road or a degrading return unbecoming such a legend, and I have to say both sides are wrong. It's a perfectly fine entrance, appropriate to the character and funny to see an older, disheleved Dr. Jones tossed out the trunk of a car and retreiving his famous fedora with as much dignity as he can muster. But again it's not an entirely new idea - Spielberg had his joke making the audience think the grave robber standing in the iconic pose wearing the coat and hat is Indy at the start of Last Crusade, then it turns out the lanky boy scout is our hero. When Indy is properly introduced in that movie, he's getting punched in the face. So in that opening there's a humorous play on his badass-walking-out-of-the-shadows Raiders entrance and his out-of-outfit, Bond-like suaveness as he moves into the club in Temple of Doom, then a second take for laughs that accentuates the character's lovable foibles: he's as vulernable as any of us, and he's always outnumbered, always outgunned. So conceptually the Crystal Skull entrance feels like a retread of Last Crusade's, but by that same logic it's funny that fans would find fault with an appearance that essentially says the same thing about the character as the last movie.

Raiders, Temple and Last Crusade all have Bond-like mini-movie openings with Jones in a scenario separate from the story proper (although they all work in characters central to the main plot and lead directly into it.) Crystal Skull foregoes that luxury and starts with the villains we'll be seeing for the rest of the film already scheming towards their ultimate goal. I have to admit I missed the pre-movie serial (although I'm glad they didn't go with Lucas' stupid "haunted castle" idea he kept trying to pitch in the 80's and almost succeeded in getting them to open Last Crusade with), but at least it's a new approach to the old formula. The bad guys not so much: the Russian henchmen are Nazis in different costumes, imposing but expendable - they even roll off trucks the same way the Germans do. Spielberg stated he couldn't go back to the Nazis as villains again after making Schindler's List (why not?) and by setting this one in the 50's the Cold War would have to be addressed. Yet the Cold War itself was so steeped in secrecy and intangible danger that Russians, just as a concept, don't come with anywhere near the amount of established evil as the Germans. Not post-Stalin Russians in Nevada anyway. And after initially gunning their way into Area 51, the Russians become practically a non-threat for the rest of movie, mostly just getting killed in the background. One of them even has glasses (and not creepy horn-rimmed Toht glasses.) So after the first scene they don't feel menacing, and they don't seem very resourceful either. In Raiders and Last Crusade, the German soldiers turned up submarines and tanks; they organize a full excavating operation in Tanis and operate out of an Austrian castle with secret fireplace passages. We even get to see of scene where the Nazis barter for desert vehicles and equipment in Last Crusade***. Here the Russians show up unannounced with machine guns and pitch tents, seemingly predicting where their American foes are going to turn up next.

To be fair, they do have a psychic with them. Cate Blanchett plays Irina Spalko, a sort of villain-by-default who never really gets used to her character's full potential. The original concept of magical artifact-hunting Nazis came from German medievalist and a SS Obersturmführer Otto Rahn, who was actually commissioned by Heinrich Himmler to try and locate the Holy Grail just before the onset of World War II. Assumedly Spalko was informed by Nina Kulagina, an alleged psychokinetic Red Army veteran studied by Russian scientists during the Cold War, and by Stalin's alleged fascination with the possibility of psychic warfare (I'm looking forward to the third film of this new trilogy that combines the two inspirations, Indiana Jones and the Penis of Rasputin. Or The Pyramid of the Penis of Rasputin?) But Spalko's ability is brought up clumsily and almost incidentally in the first scene where she probes Indy's mind to no avail, after which it's infrequently mentioned and isn't really important until the very end, having seemingly disappeared with whatever it was they ran off with from Hangar 51. It's too bad, because the psychic angle is good, I like my Indy villains with the self-destructive tendency towards personal glory (the pit Indy nearly fell into in Temple of Doom and, literally, the end of Last Crusade) and Blanchett's performance is fine - she's clearly having fun and committed to the part, she just doesn't have anything to do. With her Lulu haircut and Ninotchka charm, she could have been the romantic interest AND the villain rolled into one. That idea is never even hinted at, so she's left saying things like "Do svidanya, Dr. Jones!" In all fairness, her accent is better than Harrison Ford's in K-19: The Widowmaker. Meanwhile the guy who I guess is supposed to be her evil sidekick isn't at all memorable like Toht, Vogel or the unnamed, dialogue-less Thuggee slave driver from Temple of Doom. He isn’t even as memorable as the overenthusiastic Nazi trooper who tosses Indy out the windshield of the truck in Raiders.

Still, I mentioned that this opening scene was the best example of Harrison Ford giving Indy a sort of "older, weary adventurer" heaviness, and I'll stick to that. I liked how he tiredly requests some ammo from one of the soldiers so he can find what they're looking for. They laugh at him blatantly asking for gunpowder, but then realize it's actually a Mr. Wizard-type method of using the prize's magnetism to lead them to the proper crate. And that's a cool idea, but I kept waiting for it to pay off somehow, maybe a three-part scheme of "ha ha he's asking me for ammo so he can use it against us" leading to "oh wait he's using it to help us," followed by Indy actually using it against them somehow, like throwing it up in the air in front of the crate so it "shot" five or six of them. He would have used his "old man"ness to throw them off, then use the joke at his expense to actually do something awesome and get away! I was waiting for something great like that to happen, but when he decides to escape he just grabs one of their guns, then bolts up some boxes. 'Hm,' I thought. 'Not a very Indy-like handling of the situation.' There's some business afterwards with a fist fight and a rocket car (like in Rat Race), and our hero escapes the red non-menace.

Well, I've brought up a lot of complaints about Crystal Skull so far (and we're about 15 minutes into the movie), so let's change things up and settle into a stretch of moments I really enjoyed. Number one - nuking the fridge! This honestly might have been my favorite part in the movie, and I'm not just saying that to be controversial. It manages to do lots of things at once: it establishes the period (50's suburbia/Howdy Doody/test bomb site), creates a hopeless scenario from which there is no escape (think John McClane on the exploding roof, is that really any harder to believe?) and does something that's kind of important to these movies that I think the filmmakers underestimate which I'll mention a bit more later on, namely having Indy face the threat alone. It's hands down the most surreal action scene of any of the Indiana Jones movies**** (out-weirding even the Cairo swordsman demise in Raiders) and literally like nothing else that's come before, which in the case of Crystal Skull makes for a rare sequence indeed. I don't think anybody involved with the film would dispute the outrageousness of a man surviving a nuclear blast by getting inside a lead refrigerator, but if audiences really consider this the worst thing in the movie they must have simply failed to see the humor, and the fun, in it. I can't think of a better "oh shit" moment in modern film history than when Indy realizes where he is and what's about to happen, and Ford's reading of the line "Wait a minute..." is hilarious. If it's truly a plausibility factor that folks have an issue with, I've got to side with the film's defenders and point out that this kind of thing is no more ridiculous than anything that's ever happened in the Indyverse. Not just leaping from a plane on a raft and landing harmlessly on the hard edge of a mountain, but also running around in a literal snake pit without being bitten once and claiming not being able to fly a plane in Temple of Doom but doing just fine by Last Crusade. Oh, and face melting/heart removal/body exploding. Granted, the shot of a shaken but unharmed Indy stumbling out of the fried fridge is handled a little more cartoony than any of those scenes (although not any moreso than the guy getting "bonked" on the head with the sledgehammer in Temple of Doom, or the plane following the car into the tunnel in Last Crusade) but so what? It's the exact opposite of what's wrong with the movie, and it's certainly not worthy of becoming a new phrase for a moment so bad it ruins an entire series for eternity. Even though the movie takes place in the 50s, which I guess is when Fonzie would have been jumping that shark, nobody jumps the shark in a Spielberg movie*****. If they did, Quint would still be alive.

I wish nuking the fridge hadn't become so infamous and I could have been seeing it for the first time with no knowledge of what was going to happen. I think my mind would have been blown (no pun intended.) It was an Indiana Jones moment - the only missed opportunity here was that the hat didn't come off and get grabbed back into the shelter of the 'fridge.

The drag racing teens at the beginning of the movie was a nice touch. I don't know if it succeeded as well as the bomb test neighborhood at setting up the period, but it served as a fun way to sweep into the movie. I do question why the race required an audience of CG prairie dogs - are there no trained prairie dogs in Hollywood? Once out of the desert, we move from a race to a chase, the true staple of the Indiana Jones movies. I can't remember what exactly sets up the motorcycle chase (spies following Indy and Mutt to a malt shop?) but it's the best action sequence in the movie. Incidentally, it's also the most organic: featuring few if any CGI shots, it was planned out on good old fashioned storyboards since the computer visualists had already left production by the time the scene was being put together. Sadly it wouldn't make it into the Top Ten of Indy Action scenes, but it's exciting enough watching Indy trying to stay on the back of the Harley Softail as it ripped across the Yale campus. I really liked Indy's advice to the student about getting out of the library if he wants to be a good archaeologist, which was probably the best line in the movie.

* This could be a case of Spielberg purposely trying to ostracize Temple of Doom, the one he famously dislikes, from the rest of the movies.

** Seeing as how that's what the Russians do at the start of the movie, capturing and forcing him to help again seems really redundant.

*** And don't try to tell me the Thuggee weren't organized: they had a whole network running under the palace, lots of cheap labor and a giant fire pit (in place of a pool) to burn people in. We should all be as together as the Thuggee.

**** You'll notice here is where I start considering Crystal Skull an Indiana Jones movie.

***** Except that girl using the power of gymnastics to kick the raptor in Lost World. That certainly symbolized the ruin of the Jurassic Park movies.

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